2 Samuel 5 read as the whole technique in one episode, and one of the few places where Neville argues against the scholars by name. Zion was Jerusalem before Israel occupied it, held by the Jebusites, and it was impregnable - they taunted David that the lame and the blind alone would ward him off, so perfectly arranged was it. David took the stronghold anyway and named it the city of David, and he took it by saying: whoever would take the Jebusites, let him go up the shaft, the water shaft - a perpendicular shaft running from the rock below to the rock on which Zion was built. Neville reports that the commentators find the passage unintelligible, because David is described as building a circular city and an inward city at the same time, and no man can build in a circle and inward at once - unless he is performing the unusual architectural feat of building in a spiral. That exception, offered by the scholars as a reductio, is the reading: he IS building in a spiral. So the site is not in the Near East and no map will find it. Zion is the skull; the water shaft is the spinal column; the blind and the lame are the people in one’s own world who cannot see their way and cannot walk. The practice follows exactly: take everyone in your circular outer world and represent them to yourself as they would like to be seen, always using love as the motive, and persuade yourself it is true - and as you rearrange the circle you are moving inward and upward at the same time, unaware of it. At 1162 the mechanism is named outright: you go up the water shaft in a spiral by practising the art of revision, and it is what breaks the wheel of recurrence and turns it into ascent. At 1305 the body is drawn in - man with his skin off is an inverted tree rooted in the brain, and it does not turn up until you go up the water shaft, out of generation into regeneration - and the gate is closed to every other approach: no one can come through that gate, for the entrance in is up the water shaft. At 1966 the ascent is described as being pulled out of yourself like a whirlwind, clothed in your prenatal wholeness. The end of the sequence is the splitting of the stones from top to bottom and the serpentine ascent into Zion (M755, M498).